Ray Ison, Professor in Systems at the UK Open University since 1994, is a member of the Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Group. From 2008-15 he also developed and ran the Systemic Governance Research Program at Monash University, Melbourne. In this blog he reflects on contemporary issues from a systemic perspective.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Of course there is no such thing as a no carbon society as carbon is the basic building block of all life. But we can act to create a post-carbon society - one that does not unlock and disrupt the carbon cycle to produce adverse effects such as global warming. As I wrote in my book, 'Systems Practice: How to Act in Climate Change World' we are in a period new to human history and thus we need to critically reassess our thinking, practices, governance, institutions and investment strategies, and do it as soon as we can.

We had the first inkling of what we, as a species, could unleash upon ourselves when we invented and deployed the atomic bomb. Many of us have lived a large part of our lives with the sense that we could engage in mutual self-destruction through a nuclear war. The feeling of threat regarding nuclear war has passed although the dangers, with rogue states, and the potential for the incitement of war between nuclear states such as India and Pakistan, remain very present. (If you are sceptical I urge you to watch to the end this interview of Bruce Reidel by Charlie Rose). Unfortunately the big issues that confront us as a species are still framed and discussed in ways that negate the systemic threats they pose.

One can see this with nuclear energy. Discussions are almost universally framed as if nuclear power was a technical or economic issue. Rarely is it framed as a technology that, as with all technologies, mediates (or has the potential to mediate) our life on Earth (as well as the lives of other species). In this sense technology couples humans (lets call it a social system) to the biophysical world (or system) from which flows benign or non-benign effects to either system, or the relationship between them. Thus with nuclear power the failure to solve the waste disposal problem, recognising that it is more a social than an engineering problem, would put us on a trajectory that I, and many others, find unacceptable. Fukushima failed not because of an earthquake but because of the failure of human thinking, institutions and practices. And as our living unfolds in a climate-changing world, so too will much of our past thinking, practices, institutions etc fail us, unless we begin to think and act differently.

I feel inclined to invent a new law to describe the phenomenon that concerns me - I shall call it Ison's Law of Perverse Trajectories. To my example of over investment in nuclear power I would add continued investment in coal mining, fracking and coal seam gas as the most perverse of contemporary trajectories. Natural gas will join them soon. We have an emergency of unique proportions yet we resist the intellectual, ethical and moral imperative to move to alternative trajectories, those that will realise a post-carbon society. The Natural Step, as articulated by Karl-Henrik Robert, expressed it simply in their four system conditions: 'In the sustainable society nature is not subject to systematically increasing (i) concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth's crust (e.g. carbon, methane etc); (ii) concentrations of substances produced by society (e.g. plastics, fluorocarbons etc); (iii) degradation by physical means, and in that society (iv) human needs are met worldwide."

Given my concerns, and the state of governance today in Australia and the UK (the places I spend most of my time), I was heartened (not something that happens often) by an article written by Michael Green in yesterday's edition of The Age. The article "Mining morality or vilifying coal?" makes a strong case for divestment of shares and other holdings in companies that keep us on what I have just called a perverse trajectory i.e., a status quo trajectory rather than towards a post-carbon future. For Australia in particular, pursuit of this perverse trajectory commits the nation to being on the wrong side of history.

I commend the Uniting Church for the stand it has taken and the practical actions it is pursuing:

"In mid-July, the peak body of the Uniting Church in Australia voted to sell its investments in fossil fuels....

"We didn’t
think it was the most earth-shattering news, because it’s a pretty
mainstream issue in the Uniting Church now,” explains the church’s
president, Reverend Professor Andrew Dutney. Yet its resolution included
a moral claim that may be confronting for most Australians, who, by way
of their superannuation funds – at the very least – own a stake in
coal, oil or gas projects.

“Further
investment in the extraction of fossil fuels contributes to, and makes
it more difficult to address climate change,” the church states. Given
the harm climate change will cause, “further investment and extraction
is unethical”. “A number of people have found that to be a strong
statement,” Dutney says. “But it’s very hard to argue against.”

Australians
have two key facts to consider, he says: we’re among the world’s highest
emitters of carbon dioxide, per person; and on top of that, we have
enormous reserves of coal set to be exported for electricity generation.

“If we were to
extract and burn all those reserves, then global warming will be much
more disastrous for the poorer nations who are our neighbours.”

Andrew Dutney articulates well the case for abandoning our current trajectory. I hope to see the divestment movement grow in strength, the case for which ought to be strengthened by recent decisions in China about coal imports, triggered by the horrific pollution now affecting almost every Chinese city:

"According to an analysis by Macquarie Bank, consultant Wood Mackenzie
has indicated the ban could affect more than half of Australia's
thermal coal exports to China, although the ban is also likely to hit
Indonesian coal."

In the end it may well be coal industry economics that achieves the ambitions of divestment. I cannot help but feel this 'realpolitik' was behind the recent plans to restructure by BHP Billiton. In the meantime we should all use whatever leverage we have to facilitate further divestment - to move away from the current perverse trajectory.

At the same time there needs to be organised, critical resistance to the fight back by 'big fossil fuel' This is already happening in Australia, where years of successful environmetal legislation is being rescinded in the face of an ideological onslaught by conservative state and federal governments and their supporters. In this regard one must view the recent creation of the "Reef Trust" and the Reef 2050 Plan, with deep suspicion.

For some time now governance in Australia and the UK has been systemically failing its citizens - many, if not most, decisions reduce the number of choices we humans will have as circumstances unfold, primarily because most place the relational dynamics between us and our environment on a perverse trajectory. They fail Ison's Law!! Evidence can be seen in the report today by a cross-party Environmental Audit committee in Westminster:

"The government is failing
to reduce air pollution, protect biodiversity and prevent flooding, a
cross-party body of MPs has said. The Environmental Audit Committee dished out a "red card" on these three concerns after examining efforts made since 2010.

The MPs said on a further seven green issues ministers deserved a "yellow card" denoting unsatisfactory progress."

Not surprisingly, though in the absence of evidence to the contrary:

"The government said it strongly disagreed with the findings. After coming to power in 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron stated he was committed to leading the "greenest government ever"."
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The most perverse of perverse trajectories are those where technologies, if they fail, destroy or severely impair the lives of future generations. Nuclear waste, the irreversible destruction and contamination of aquifers by fracking or coal seam gas extraction, deep mining and toxic tailings (as has happened already in South Africa) are the worst of the worst!

Monday, September 15, 2014

Many children grow up with an ethos that to share is good. And in many ways it is. However I have come to realise that there is a problem with sharing and most folk, in my experience, do not realise what the problem is. The roots of the problem can be found in the propensity we have to migrate words away from their etymology and to use them in contexts which begin the insidious process of conserving semantic confusion. This is an issue I have been aware of for some time - I think courtesy of one of the many profound conversations I have had with my friend David Russell. Certainly I have warned most of my PhD students away from the deployment of 'sharing' in their writing. However I have not written about it till now, prompted by an invitation to look over an abstract developed by a colleague in which he deployed 'sharing' in ways that fueled my long-standing concerns.

Sharing is of course a verb meaning to cut into parts, to make a division, a section, a part, a piece (as in pie) or portion (as in land) or to divide up labour (from which troop derives). Etymologically share can be traced back to the old English word for shear, associated with parting the land, as happens when using a ploughshare; then followed harvest and cutting time from which one received one's share. From this can be seen how the idea of share- receiving or share-holding (as in companies, businesses etc arise). In the early Middle Ages a share was a portion of a levy imposed on fishing boats. What these different roots have in common is the idea that a share arises from a whole - in other words sharing is to do with a part-whole relationship. The other important aspect of this etymology is that sharing is grounded in materiality - there is usually something tangible, or physical to be shared, even if it is denoted by a share certificate. It is in the movement away from these etymological roots that my problem with sharing arises!

We live in a world now, where those who use English believe it is possible to share knowledge. meaning, experiences, information - in fact all sorts of abstract concepts - as if there was a part-whole relationship and as if there were some hidden materiality behind what is being shared! We have begun the process of conserving semantic inaccuracy, one that does not serve us well, because it distorts all sorts of understandings and practices in fields ranging from politics to computing. We humans live in language and it is our evolutionary past that we have in common as our living unfolds, day by day. Our cultural histories expose us to many common phenomena (i.e., we cannot escape our social embeddedness) but our experiential history is always unique - all we have at our disposal is our ability to use language (in its broadest sense) to communicate (talk, converse, dance etc) about our experiences. Thus whenever a claim is made that we share understanding, or knowledge or meaning, then we are making a claim about the status of our social relations in our conversations with others, not a state of our being.

Can we alter our trajectory - or has 'sharing' gone feral? Unfortunately there are few opportunities in contemporary education to generate the reflexivity that we need to explore, and where needed, change our manners of living in language. Perhaps we need an etymology ap that fosters the reflexivity that is needed?